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Samaritan or Scrooge? The Contested Image of Thomas Guy in Eighteenth-Century England

1996/09/01 by David H. Solkin · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Glory #Battle #Ideology #Reputation #Sculpture #Painting #Art #Art history #Flourishing #Trojan #History #Law #Political science #Ancient history #Psychology #Politics #Computer science

paper · doi:10.1080/00043079.1996.10786698

openalex publication_date 1996/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Upon his death in 1724, the London bookseller Thomas Guy bequeathed an enormous sum of money to the hospital which bore his name. For some contemporaries this represented the crowning glory of the life of a virtuous Christian; for others, the final vicious gesture of a self-serving and hypocritical miser. Between the 1730s and the 1770s the running battle over Guy's reputation generated a significant constellation of sculptures, paintings, and prints—a field of conflicting representations that highlight some of the larger ideological dilemmas of an expanding commercial society.

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